2010 PHM Society Conference Data Challenge

The PHM Data Challenge is a competition open to all potential conference attendees. This year the challenge is focused on RUL estimation for a high-speed CNC milling machine cutters using dynamometer, accelerometer, and acoustic emission data.

Both Student and Professional teams are encouraged to enter! Winners of the Student and the Professional categories who attend the conference and submit an invited paper to ijPHM on their technique will be awarded a cash prize. Top scoring participants will be invited to present at a special session of the conference.

Participants will be scored based on their ability to estimate the remaining useful life of a 6mm ball nose tungsten carbide cutter. Winners of the Student and the Professional categories who attend the conference and submit an invited paper to ijPHM on their technique will be awarded a cash prize. Top scoring participants will be invited to present at a special session of the conference.

Teams
Teams may be comprised of one or more researchers. One winner from each of two categories will be determined on the basis of score. The categories are:

Professional: open to anyone (including mixed teams)

Student: open to any team with all members enrolled as full time students during the spring or fall 2010 semesters.

Teams must declare what category they belong to when signing up. There is a cash prize of $1000 for the top entrant from each category, contingent upon:

attending the conference

giving an invited presentation on the winning technique

submitting a journal-quality paper to the International Journal of Prognostics and Health Management (ijPHM) which discloses the full algorithm used.

Additionally, top scoring teams will be invited to give presentations at a special session, and submit papers to ijPHM. Submission of the challenge special session papers is outside the regular paper submission process and follows its own schedule.

The organizers of the competition reserve the right to both modify these rules and disqualify any team at their discretion.

Registration
Teams may register by contacting the Competition organizers with their name(s), a team alias under which the scores would be posted, affiliation(s) with address(es), contact phone number (for verification) and competition category (professional or student). Student teams should also send the name of the university and the semesters where they are enrolled full-time. You will be emailed your username and password after verification.

PLEASE NOTE: In the spirit of fair competition, we allow only one account per team. Please do not register multiple times under different user names, under fictitious names, or using anonymous accounts. Competition organizers reserve the right to delete multiple entries from the same person (or team) and/or to disqualify those who are trying to "game" the system or using fictitious identities.

The data files are ~800 MB each, and were compressed using the bZip2 algorithm. If your un-zipping software complains, make sure it is bZip2-compatible. 7-Zip is Windows open-source software that works well; Linux users can use the bunzip2 command; Mac users can use Stuffit.

Note that if you downloaded a copy of c3.zip with a wear file in it, this file is incorrect. Please discard it. The data acquisition files are OK.

Some background on the apparatus and experimental setup can be found here, and in the references in that paper. The spindle speed of the cutter was 10400 RPM; feed rate was 1555 mm/min; Y depth of cut (radial) was 0.125 mm; Z depth of cut (axial) was 0.2 mm. Data was acquired at 50 KHz/channel.

Domain Fundamentals
At the highest level, you want to:
1) Filter noise (or not) from the raw data
2. Extract features from the seven channels
3. Select feature subset(s) from extracted features
4. Model wear using the selected features
5. Predict RUL based on the models
6. Test accuracy and reliability using leave-one-out cross-validation

Performance Evaluation
Details on how the competition is scored are here.

Submitting Results
Instructions on submitting your results are e-mailed to you when you register for the competition.